The Real Estate Broker Who's Done $4.1B In Deals And Helped Barry Bonds Hit 762 Home Runs

As Major League Baseball's spring training fully kicks off with the start of games on Friday, Newmark Executive Managing Director John Yandle will trade a briefcase for a ballcap, ascend the dirt-packed pitching mound and hurl cookies over the plate for hitters to feast on.  

This is a familiar routine for the 71-year-old real estate veteran, who led a professional double life for four decades as the San Francisco Giants' left-handed batting practice pitcher while also closing $4.1B worth of deals in the boardroom. 

Yandle has grooved pitches for Barry Bonds — while inking major agreements with companies like Microsoft — in a career arc defined by sacrifice and determination. 

“Real estate is where I made my living, and it was the most important,” Yandle said. “But I couldn't ignore one for the other. So you just learn how to balance.”

Yandle’s balancing act began in 1985. He started in commercial real estate with Cushman & Wakefield early that year, and at the end of the Giants’ season that October, he went to San Francisco to visit a friend he had played with on a Holyoke, Massachusetts, minor league team who made it to the major leagues. 

The Stanford University graduate already had a little professional baseball experience. The Kansas City Royals selected Yandle in the 11th round of the 1977 amateur draft, but he never made it to the show, despite knocking on the door in the upper minors. As luck would have it, the Giants’ coaches had sore arms and needed someone to throw batting practice. 

“I had to think about it for about five minutes and then said yes,” Yandle said. 

More than 40 years later, Yandle arrived in Scottsdale, Arizona, at spring training this year in early January, well before pitchers and catchers reported, to work with the Giants’ minor league camps. 

He gets to the ballpark at 9 each morning before getting dressed and lifting light weights to get the blood flowing to his arm. Then he will either throw or shag balls, and while the team is fielding grounders, he will run a couple of miles around the field. When he gets home in the early afternoon, he will take care of any outstanding brokerage work. 

Yandle’s job on the mound is the same as it has been for decades: prepare hitters for left-handed pitching and throw the ball over the middle as much as possible, unless a hitter asks for a different location. Hitters don’t want to be jammed, look bad or play off balance during batting practice. 

“I don't want my ball to move, which it can from time to time,” Yandle said. “That's why I got the nickname ‘Cutter John.’”

Barry And The Broker

The first time Bonds asked Yandle to throw him batting practice, there was a problem. 

Yandle was hosting a Bank of America group — one of his best real estate clients — at a Giants game, and they were tailgating in the parking lot. But after Bonds saw Yandle throw to another hitter, he requested the pitcher’s services. 

Yandle agreed but asked the Giants slugger a favor in return for skipping the tailgate: meet them in the parking lot after the batting practice session. Bonds accepted the terms. 

“Barry couldn't have been nicer, and they loved it,” Yandle said. “I developed a lot of good favor with that client.”

Still, Yandle didn’t leverage his dual roles as much as he could have to do business, because he didn’t want the Giants to think he was throwing batting practice to close deals. He wanted baseball to be separate from work and work to be separate from baseball. 

The separation paid off — the greatest slugger in major league history credits a portion of his success to the broker responsible for more than 25M SF leased and sold.

Baseball is often considered a game of failure, where the best hitters in the game get on base well under half of their plate appearances. Bonds is a notable outlier, posting four seasons with an on-base percentage over .500. 

MLB’s all-time home run leader would play mock games with Yandle, who would unleash an arsenal of fastballs, curveballs and sliders in practice, ranging from about 15 to 90 pitches. Bonds wanted practice to be difficult. Yandle, throwing to the left-handed hitting Bonds, upped the challenge with both players setting up from the same side. 

They would keep score in their practice games, with Yandle putting on yet another hat as the umpire. In some instances, he would rule a clear home run a flyout, Bonds would complain, and Yandle would threaten to throw him out.   

In Bonds’ Giants number retirement speech in 2018, the legendary hitter touted Yandle’s importance to his record-breaking career. 

“John Yandle, what can I say about you?” Bonds said. “Seven hundred sixty-two [home runs]. I would’ve never gotten there without you.” 

A Little Bit Of Everything

The real estate veteran’s versatility hasn’t been limited to his two career paths, as he’s worked on disparate deals in CRE itself. 

Yandle started his career with automotive deals on a main retail street for about a year and a half before working on “a little bit of everything.” He would do retail deals in Palo Alto and land deals in South San Jose — locations 40 miles apart, requiring different processes and knowledge to execute. 

His CRE experience has run the gamut, including industrial, research and development, residential, office and land deals. He has worked for Cushman & Wakefield, CBRE and now Newmark. 

The day-to-day juggling of responsibilities required patience from his employers and copious travel. 

Throwing batting practice takes only about 45 minutes to an hour per day, usually split into a couple of different segments. But the real time crunch was flying back and forth between various ballparks and the office. Yandle would do CRE work on the plane and in hotels well before remote work was common, taking red-eye flights back if he needed to be in the office bright and early. 

Still, his “life of busyness” meant he sometimes missed meetings or had to cancel or postpone tours, which even his clients understood.

“The company and the brokers had to be patient with it,” Yandle said. “I've always said if I was flipping burgers at McDonald's, they wouldn't have been as forgiving of my schedule as if I was doing this with the Giants.” 

Research wasn’t as easy when Yandle got his start without robust computer databases of property information. He would pore over thick binders in file cabinets and drive through streets searching for “For Lease” signs as he prospected for opportunities across asset classes.

The process wasn’t particularly efficient, and Yandle said he ran his business like that for too long. Although he is proud of his career, a scattershot approach that eschews specialization isn’t a path he recommends for brokers just getting into the business. 

“Do as I say, not as I did,” Yandle said.

Lessons Of Success

The largest deal Yandle has brokered was Microsoft’s 65-acre, $73M San Jose purchase for data center and light industrial uses in 2017, well before the data center boom driving up acquisition costs in today’s market. 

He was involved on a daily basis with the city, Microsoft and hosts of different departments, including the Energy Department, the California Fish and Game Commission and the Audubon Society — because birds would fly into the building if it was too high. 

It took several years to come to a deal, with Yandle navigating neighbors who had a different vision for what the property should be and landlords who wanted to leverage Microsoft’s financial might to drive up the price to put a water well needed for the project on their property. 

“You want to be successful and close it and get the commission and the notoriety and me being able to say I did it, but you don't also want to fail and say, ‘God, I just wasted three years of my life, and now there's nothing there,’” Yandle said. “There were a couple of times I thought, ‘There is no answer to this. We're not going to be able to figure this one out.’”

The tech giant finally got the green light for its data center plans in 2025, eight years after Yandle brokered the deal. 

Yandle has applied lessons he has learned from baseball to his real estate work, balancing the emotional peaks that come with closing a big deal or winning a key game and the valleys that accompany losses. Success is fleeting, he said, and you have to keep at it. 

“You can't get too high when you close a deal or you win a game, because tomorrow is another day,” Yandle said. “It's easier said than done, and it doesn't always happen, but the more even-keeled you can keep your career, the better off you're going to be.”